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“It’s not your story that matters. It’s how you tell it.”

“Any artist of any kind has to be able to stomach falling short of the mark, continually, in kinds of ways….

As the poet William Stafford often said to students: You’ve got to lower your standards! You can’t compare yourself either the most renowned writers in the history of literature, for example.”

“I keep suspecting I’m out of business and better become a rock star or buy a greenhouse or something. Right now I don’t feel particularly in business, but I m ow how to get in business - It’s a little like an Ouija board. I will try to get a clue to what my intelligence wants to talk about, and then I will try to talk about it more and more.”

“As a writer, I share a problem…with most human beings: a tendency to lose contact with my own intelligence. It’s almost as if there were a layer of fat upon the part of us that thinks and it’s the writer’s job to hack through and discover what is inside.”

“If you’re a writer or an artist of any kind, your self-expression will ring a bell with some other self. You can count on that.”

“Breakfast of Champions isn’t a threat to commit suicide, incidentally. It’s my promise that I’m beyond that now. Which is something for me. I’m used to think of it as a perfectly reasonable way to avoid delivering a lecture, to avoid a deadline, to not pay a bill, to not got to a cocktail party.”

“Could his parents have helped themselves or were they programmed by their chemistry and their own upbringings to behave as they did? Is it possible for anyone to transcend his or her own chemistry and programming?”

“You do not have to experience death or destruction or agony to write. You simply have to care about something.”

1 Make a commitment
2 Trust date, your Fairy Godmother Collaborator
3 Tell the truth
4 Keep on truckin’
5 Surrender perfection

“Surrendering perfection happens, more or less, to all writers….
He had to sacrifice his dream of what the book might be for the sake of what he could in fact now deliver…

Writers can’t write great things all the time. You can do the best you can, then you have to move on. Otherwise you’ll end up writing the same book your whole life.”

“We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”

“Be kind to yourself. Give yourself room. There are years to go. Don’t pummel yourself with expectation. Go easy. Your material will eventually find its way to voice.”

“A culture can contain fatal poisons…a respect for firearms, for example….”

Rules:
1 Find a subject you care about
2 Do not ramble
3 Keep it simple
4 Have the guts to cut
5 Sound like yourself
6 Say what you mean to say
7 Pity the readers

“Every writer feels inept. Even Kurt Vonnegut. Just stick to your chair and keep on typing.”